The Italian-American Woman: Searching for a Sense of Identity through Literature

 

For this much is certainly true of Italian women: they have resources of strength which are denied in the stereotype of them as merely submissive and servile creatures to their men. Back at the beginning of this century, Jacob Riis, who photographed and wrote of the immigrants in their tene­ment life on the Lower East Side of New York, noted, “There is that about the Italian woman which suggests the capacity for better things.” Did he mean her strength, her endurance, her grace under pressure, her faith? They are qualities her daughters and granddaughters cherish and will retain, adjusted to new uses. There are certain mindsets, however, endemic among the Italian immigrants, which are taking generations to reshape. Self-denial was the psycho­logical preparation among peasants for survival in regions where la miseria was the norm of life and there was no chance of a better one. Therefore, one denied oneself aspira­tions and one’s children education because both were futile. When the poor did leave to better themselves in this coun­try, they brought their ways intact, including the old miseria mentality. (Barolini 8)

 

In a wonderful and enlightening Introduction to The Dream Book, author Helen Barolini gives us many refreshing glimpses of Italian-American women that are often contrary to the stereotypi­cal view that Italian-American men have often championed and that Italian-American women are trying to get out from under. Barolini examines the relationship between the immigrant Italian woman’s ideal of self-sacrifice and the difficulty the ensuing gen­erations of Italian-American women experience in coming to terms with fulfilling their own needs and desires. Indeed, much of the literature I have read for this paper deals with the immigrant theme of self-denial on one hand, and the efforts of Italian-Ameri­can women to balance their love of family with their need to ex­plore their own identities.

It is also interesting to note that women of other ethnic groups, especially those who came to America at about the same time as the Italians, seem to have made the cultural and democratic tran­sition into the mainstream of American life a lot sooner and smoother than we, in spite of the fact that they too had a strong sense of family, spoke little English and were not skilled. Ms. Barolini sees the inevitability of young, educated Italian Ameri­cans following better job opportunities and abandoning the tradi­tional cohesiveness of family and neighborhood, just as other eth­nic groups have done (15). Also, she sees the young as being less affected by the authority of their parents and more willing to pur­sue their own wants and needs (15). She goes on:

 

 But, most of all, family life, which (some) see as a rock of solidity in a sea of undermining change, will no longer be able to count on the self-sacrifice of women to support it unilaterally. And then what will happen to that statistic which is cited so proudly, that an overwhelming proportion of aged Italian Americans live with relatives as compared to other ethnic groups? Can it be that this was indicative more of dependence and unpreparedness to act on one’s own than of family cohesion? A Pittsburgh study of women spanning three generations among Jews, Italians, and Slo­vaks showed Italian women far less independent than the other groups. Elderly Jewish widowed women, for instance, while maintaining close ties to their children, preferred to live separately and independently and to respect the privacy of their grown children’s lives. (15)

 

I would be the first to concede the difficulties of having elderly parents live in our home, but the fact is that my husband and I instigated my parents’ moving into the vacant apartment in our two-family house. Why then, did I encourage it? Am I so imbued with the stereotype of the dutiful daughter and the self-sacrificing immigrant thinking that has come down to me, that I could do no differently? What is this irresistible pull of familial duty within the Italian-American women’s psyche? Ms. Barolini examines the myth of that “perfect” Italian-American family:

 

Family is so central to the core of belief and identity of an Italian American woman that it becomes an irreducible, il­logical yearning. In her essay, “Godfather II” . . . Barbara Grizzuti Harrison [whose immigrant father was prone to fits of violent rage] expresses a longing for the Italian family that goes beyond reality, and she knows it; her critical fac­ulty is right: there never was that perfect state of warmth, security, emotional support. There was an uneasy balance of trade-offs in which “family” cost “freedom.” Yet, emotion­ally, she is, like a moth, drawn to that tempting flame of warmth that the trope of family seems to mean. (17)

 

I am a third-generation Italian-American woman who has basi­cally been raised to believe that the good of the family should come before my own desires. In that respect, I believe that the first forty years or so of my life were lived very much within an immi­grant mindset and only the last several years have I made baby steps to free myself from this thinking, while balancing my re­sponsibilities to husband, children, and parents. I have grown ac­customed to not getting the emotional support that I needed from my parents, and at times, from my husband; I finally know that I must simply do what I believe is right for me, even though at times there is still a wide road between the knowing and the do­ing.

When I read Blood of My Blood by Richard Gambino several years ago, I must admit that I winced more than once at his image of Italian-American women and my obvious falling-short of his ideal. Therefore, I was gratified to read the following by Barolini:

 

. . . Gambino has woven an illusion. His model woman does not exist; and, if she did, she is no longer desirable to those educated and socially evolving Italian American males (like himself) who have committed exogamy, fleeing her com­pany and the miseria mentality for Jewish and Wasp wives. For one of the most verifiable phenomena of Italian Ameri­can men is that, in their zest for upward mobility, they marry outside their group. . . . Gambino understands the dilemma of the modern Italian American woman caught in the clash between tradition and her own self-fulfillment. Though as an Italian American male he betrays nostalgia for la donna seria and her service-to-family role, as an intellec­tual he also fully recognizes the conflicted personality which the Italian American woman harbors, trapped as she is be­tween being “American in form, but Italian in substance.” (11–13)

 

In a wonderful essay entitled, “Definitions of Womanhood: Class, Acculturation, and Feminism,” which is included in The Dream Book, I was further heartened to read the following from author Carol Bonomo Ahearn:

 

. . . there is a danger for some to carve in stone a fixed defi­nition of what it means to be an Italian American man or woman. I wish to focus specifically on definitions of Italian American women to suggest that the range of role defini­tions are myriad, that a woman must know herself as an in­dividual to determine what is best for her, and that she must also know the socioeconomic and historical context of her Italian American tradition, so that she can resolve apparent conflict between the pull of the family and of her individual desires. (126)

 

 Indeed, the importance of knowing oneself as an individual transcends gender and ancestral roots, and each of us needs to make that journey in our own lives. But it would seem that Italian American women are over-burdened by “the conflict between the pull of family and of her individual desires” (126).

Ms. Ahearn goes on:

 

For purposes of clarification, I have devised a construct of four dominant stages in the acculturation process. They are by no means definitive or rigid, allow for some fluidity, and are certainly open to refinement. The first stage is the immi­grant stage of trust and hope—trust in one’s cultural val­ues—and hope for a better life in a material sense; the sec­ond stage gives way to shame and doubt about one’s heritage, and a vague desire for new goals in life. This stage gives rise to the third stage of role confusion, where the goals of one’s heritage, one’s personal goals and the goals of the new culture (in this case America) all seem to be irrevo­cably at odds with each other; and the last stage which I call integrated autonomy, in which all three forces are resolved in a personal manner satisfactory to the specific individual. (126)

Each of the stories, poems, and essays I read touched me in some way and I would like to use some of them to reflect these stages of acculturation. Ahearn examines the immigrant woman/ mother figures in two novels, Lucia from The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo and Umbertina by Helen Barolini, within the context of this acculturation process. Ahearn believes that these two stories should be looked at “in tandem, because taken together they form a whole in the experience and evolution of the contemporary Italian American woman” (126).

The twice-married Lucia is left with her six children when her second husband is institutionalized. Her goal to provide for her children against over-powering poverty is the very source of her strength; “Her hope was a physical energy replenished by her love for her children and the necessity to do battle for them” (Puzo; qtd. in Ahearn 128). In true immigrant fashion, the battle she wages is for their daily bread, as well as maintaining the cohe­siveness of her family unit, believing instinctively that one would mean nothing without the other.

In Umbertina, we see “the role of the women of one Italian American family, from grandmother to great-granddaughter. Umbertina is the founding mother . . . of the immigrant genera­tion, corresponding to Lucia and possessing the same strength and courage” (133). Although she has a husband who works, “Umbertina directs her energies on establishing her own economic independence as contrasted with Lucia, who relies solely upon her children for her financial support” (133).

Both of these immigrant women have a tunnel vision, free of confusion or shame, to doggedly pursue the simplest goal: sur­vival and unity of the family. They, like my own immigrant grandmothers, personified the first stage of acculturation that Ahearn identifies, “. . . trust in one’s cultural values and hope for a better life in a material sense” (126).

There are many other examples of the immigrant mentality in the many stories contained in the marvelous book, From the Mar­gin edited by Anthony Tamburri et al. In Daniela Gioseffi’s “Rosa in Television Land,” we see the negative side of holding on to one’s cultural values and the feelings of shame in accepting “charity” when sixty-seven-year-old Rosa, a childless widow car­ing for her frail and sick sister, is chosen for a T.V. commercial for an Italian product. She enters a world of Victorian beauty in the Jersey countryside, sees the huge amounts of food used in the commercial, and then watches in horror as the food is thrown away. She returns to her tenement apartment and her sister, barely able to feed them both because, like her father, in spite of working for many years, she identifies Social Security with welfare and will not accept it. Gioseffi shows us the heartbreaking contrast be­tween the resigned and stoic suffering in Rosa’s life (la miseria) and the elusive, illusory “American Dream,” which she knows is not for her.

Another negative example of the immigrant psyche is the pow­erful story of Gioseffi’s “Marital Bliss.” Mary Alice, the wife, is similar to Puzo’s Lucia: “. . . Madonna-like, strong in her role of suffering and by enduring, triumphing” (Ahearn 29). Mary Alice submissively tolerates her husband’s womanizing and his lack of ambition to provide for his large family. She starts a laundry service to make money, thus taking all the responsibility onto her­self for the welfare of her children, as well as forgiving Pete eve­rything. (“She managed pretty well and kept handsome Pete in hamburgers, too” [29].) She completely subjugates herself for the good of the family. Pete has a change of heart toward her when they are robbed at gunpoint and he, for the first time, realizes what his life would be without her hard work and dedication. He comes to see her as having value – to fulfill his needs – as he makes love to her, instead of just having sex, for the first time in their relationship. In a burst of clarity that comes with her rare sexual fulfillment, she understands at that moment the level of his previous selfishness and closes herself off from him. She dies a few years later, convinced that she fulfilled her purpose in life (29).

By far, the largest body of reading I have done reflects the sec­ond and third stages of Ahearn’s definition of acculturation: “the second stage gives way to shame and doubt about one’s heritage, and a vague desire for new goals in life. This stage gives rise to the third stage of role confusion, where the goals of one’s heritage, one’s personal goals and the goals of the new culture . . . all seem to be irrevocably at odds with each other” (126).

Giose Rimanelli’s “Memory of Two Tuesdays,” is a quixotic story of the antithesis of Mary Alice: This young woman, Lisa, is under the complete control of her over-bearing mother and we watch her journey from that point as she evolves through all four stages of acculturation to complete independence. In the begin­ning, she leaves her new husband at her mother’s insistence, has a baby, then meets her husband once a week for love-making, de­cides to leave her mother to live with her husband but leaves her son to be raised by her mother (she has no desire to mother him), becomes increasingly strong-willed and expects her husband to quit his job and move when she feels the need to do so (he is the wage-earner), which all finally leads up to leaving her husband. She uses her husband’s brief extra marital affair as an excuse to leave him, citing Jungian reasoning for the necessity of cutting Simon out of her life to preserve her own sense of identity. She severs all ties to those who would pin her down with responsibil­ity to anyone except herself; almost the exact opposite of Mary Alice, who was programmed like a plow-horse to serve. Perhaps Lisa’s drastic leap for independence is a product of her mother’s desperate attempt to grasp Lisa to herself to fill the void of her own failed life. To me though, in spite of Ahearn’s posit that the fourth stage of acculturation is when “. . . all three forces are re­solved in a personal manner satisfactory to the specific individ­ual” (126), Lisa is as bereft of “self” as Mary Alice because in her attempts toward self-fulfillment, she cuts herself off from an in­trinsic and fulfilling part of life—the love of husband, children, and family.

In a moving portrayal of the changing traditions of subsequent generations of Italian Americans entitled “An American Dream” by Rosemarie Santini, we see the emotions of the second-genera­tion grandmother, Ida, as she watches in confusion as her children and grandchildren scurry about their busy work and social sched­ules. Ida “does not fit the popular picture of an Italian Mama” (141). She, like many second-generation women, has one foot in the old world and one in the new, and although she strives to be American in her dress and speech, Italian tradition is still the bul­wark of her life (140). Ms. Santini sets the story around Ida dili­gently making her home-made fettucine, and her memories of her own mother while kneading the dough and cutting the noodles. It is an act of love, a gift for her family symbolizing the cohesiveness that is no longer there. She lovingly lays the noodles on a clean sheet on the bed and waits for her children and grandchildren to make the time to eat them (142).

In a poignant nonfiction story by Fran Claro called “South Brooklyn, 1947,” we see the pain and embarrassment that her mother, a second-generation Italian American, felt toward her heritage. The mother grows to hate everything Italian, even her name. (“Oh, I hate that ‘Marie’. My name is Mary” [78].) She im­merses herself as much as possible in American culture, and “as she grew into adulthood, her childhood dreams of American re­spectability grew into a determination to separate her children from a culture she had learned to despise” (78). During one of the feasts in her neighborhood, she reluctantly takes her children for a walk around the feast and spends as little time speaking with her immigrant father as possible. As they hurry home, to her chil­dren’s complaints, she is horrified to see the Irish priest approach them.

 

To herself she was saying: Good Irish father, forgive me, but my children don’t know what they’re doing. You can be here because you’re not one of us. . . . You can be an ob­server. But my kids, they want to listen to the music and eat the food and play the games. And my father, he’s proud. He thinks this stinking, filthy display will do honor to a saint. (81)

 

In spite of her mother’s shame and confusion, Ms. Claro evolves into a perfect example of Ms. Ahearn’s fourth stage of ac­culturation, in that she pursues her heritage and gently brings her mother to share her pride. She goes on to say how she, too, emu­lated the Irish Catholic girls her mother admired so much, and when she entered college, realized that it was her mother, not her­self, who was so bothered by their Italianness (83). She immerses herself in the study of Italian language and culture and speaks to her mother about the beauty of these things.

 

After my brother and I became the adults she wanted us to be . . . she realized that without the feasts and the church and the dozens of relatives, we would not have been the same people. After all those years, she was ready to learn about and enjoy her own culture. She had decided to be­come an Italian. (83)

 

Next, I would like to show some further examples of Ahearn’s fourth stage in the acculturation process. In a book of poetry called Where I Come From by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, there is a poem called “Arturo,” in which Ms. Gillan remembers the embar­rassment her father caused her to feel because of his Italianness and how she told everyone his name was Arthur and that her name was Marie,

 

hoping no one would notice my face with its dark Italian eyes. Arturo, I send you this message from my younger self, that fool who needed to deny the word (Wop! Guinea! Greaseball!) slung like curved spears, the anguish of sand­wiches made from spinach and oil; the roasted peppers on homemade bread, the rice pies of Easter. . . . I smile when I think of you. Listen, America, this is my father, Arturo, and I am his daughter, Maria. Do not call me Marie. (50)

 

The last example I would like to look at is Tina, the great granddaughter of Umbertina, who seems to have found a tranquil balance in her journey to individuation. After her mother’s death, she reads her diary and begins to understand the confusion and conflict that ultimately leads to her mother’s suicide. Tina’s non Italian boyfriend at one point says to her: “I think too much is made of this whole family business. After all, once you’ve grown, you can live where and with whom you choose and have the life you choose” (Barolini; qtd. in Ahearn 138). To which Tina re­sponds:

 

Yes, sure, but maybe the point is you can’t grow up to get out for good if the family isn’t supportive in the beginning. A strong base is like a launching pad. But a weak one is just a swamp. I think that’s why my mother never got wholly away – there was no push upward from behind her. She was meant to fizzle out. (Barolini; qtd. in Ahearn 138)

 

Tina’s grandmother (Umbertina’s daughter) finds admiration for Tina’s struggle for autonomy, which ironically, she could not recognize in her own daughter: “Your mother . . . never knew what she wanted. But you’re more like my mother, the Umbertina for whom you’re named. She was a strong person and she stuck to her guns” (qtd. in Ahearn 138). Tina decides to embrace all that she is—both an Italian and an American, discovering ways to in­tegrate her two worlds, as did Umbertina. And so Tina, “feminist that (she) is” (138) is confidently on the road toward “integrated autonomy, in which all three forces are resolved in a personal manner satisfactory to the specific individual” (126).

I came across a paragraph in The Book of Lilith written by Bar­bara Black Koltuv, a practicing Jungian analyst, which might be relevant here. This piece was written by Virginia Woolf:

 

. . . I discovered that . . . I should do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, “The Angel in the House” . . . She was in­tensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft, she sat in it. In short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize with the minds and wishes of others. Above all, I need not say it—she was pure. . . . And when I came to write, I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. . . . She slipped behind me and whis­pered. . . . Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter, deceive; use all the arts and wiles of your sex. Never let any one guess you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure. And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself. . . . I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me. (qtd. in Koltuv 87)

 

When I read this, it was not Lucia or Umbertina that I thought of; they knew exactly what they needed and pursued it. It was the confused and conflicted second and third generations that I rec­ognized, myself included.

I have read different points of view by many different authors regarding the road to autonomy and self-fulfillment. Ms. Barolini seems to be saying that in order to achieve this goal, we must cut ourselves off from the old way. But I see a danger in that also. Like Lisa in “The Memory of Two Tuesdays,” by stripping herself of all ties to family, she must conduct her life in such a way as to please only herself, to concentrate only on her needs, to fulfill only her desires, for nothing else has meaning for her. I see this as a terrible isolation. Emotional life for Lisa would mean emotional death to me.

Is it just a sense of duty that compels me to look after my par­ents? Am I like that moth who finds the warm flame of family so irresistible that Ms. Harrison discusses? I have come to under­stand many things about the way I was raised: the suspicion of “strangers,” the closing-off of oneself from anyone outside the family and the inter-dependence of family members. These are learned characteristics resulting from centuries of fighting for sur­vival. But when all this is sifted through, I’d like to think that what is left is love, simple and pure, from one generation to another. And so, in the end, we must try to find the proper balance and do what fulfills each of us.

 

Carole A. Clemente

Queens College

 

WORKS CITED

Ahearn, Carol Bonomo. “Definitions of Womanhood: Class, Ac­culturation, and Feminism.” Barolini 126–39.

Barolini, Helen, Introd. and ed. The Dream Book. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.

Claro, Fran. “South Brooklyn, 1947.” Barolini 77–83.

Gillan, Maria Mazziotti. Where I Come from. Toronto: Guernica, l995.

Gioseffi, Daniela. “Rosa in Television Land.” Tamburri et al. 20–28.

___. “Marital Bliss.” Tamburri et al. 29–30.

Koltuv, Barbara Black. The Book of Lilith. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 1986.

Rimanelli, Giose. “Memory of Two Tuesdays.” Tamburri et al. 31–38.

Santini, Rosemarie. “An American Dream.” Barolini 140–44.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian et al., eds. From the Margin. West La­fayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1991.